The penguin update has stirred up the SEO world as websites lost their rankings suddenly in a single day. As you already know, this had agitated many and there were lots of online businesses which were shut down only because a single algorithm update from Google. From then, it has become a risky game for all and so, ears are now wide open to know about updates to Google algorithms. Now Google has made it a common practice to refresh their algorithms to clean up the search results. And it is a huge sigh of relief when Google says “minor update with 1% affected queries”. Referring as 1% is a common numbering by Google when they describe a minor algorithm update, mostly a refresh. They did the same for all the Google Panda algorithm updates including the most recent 3.8 version. You may think that 1% is a negligible figure, when it comes to Google search queries, 1% means a lot.According to Google search data published by StatisticBrain, during 2011, the average searches done per day sums up to 4,717,000,000. Out of this number of daily searches, there would be a huge percentage of unique queries. Considering that fact, 1% affected queries still means a lot. This in turn means that a minor “Google algorithm refresh” is equally important to a critical algorithm update.Obviously, though Google has claimed that panda 3.8 is a minor refresh with only 1% of the queries affected, there are many sites whose rankings have disappeared AGAIN. In fact all the websites that dropped rankings because of the panda 3.8 update were thinking that their SEO and website standards were upto the guidelines. Google is a in a quest to present cleaner search results, which challenges the SEO experts and webmasters to come up with a safe set of parameters to follow. Panda 3.8 update is not perfect as well. There are reports where the entire first page of search results is filled with Wikipedia results for the keyword “curtains” (This was mentioned in a comment on a news post). This obviously means that soon, there would be another refresh very soon. Anyways, Google is running out of decimal numbers unless they wish to go for 3.9.1 and call it a minor refresh.Has you site taken the hit?